MICHAEL DERVANreviews the East Meets West Festival at the Cork School of Music
East Meets West
Cork School of Music
A string quartet from Singapore, the T'ang, and one from Europe, the Callino, fulfilled the promise in the title of the East Meets West festival at the CIT Cork School of Music. The T'ang Quartet didn't actually bring any music from their own part of Asia, nothing from Singapore itself or even China or Japan, leaving Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's Mugam Sayagias the easternmost outpost of the programming.
The mugam of the title is a reference to a centuries' old form of music-making which, under slightly different names, crosses many national boundaries in Asia. Ali-Zadeh's mugam is a theatrical piece that opens with just a ruminating cellist on stage, the other players adding to the improvisatory soundworld from afar before joining together onstage for an unorthodox celebration that involves percussion as well as string playing.
The T'ang Quartet know how to make the most of this kind of exotically flavoured music, and the audience gave the performance an enthusiastic welcome, as, in another programme, they did the rigorous patterns of Henryk Górecki's Quasi una fantasia, a work that spends much of its time bringing Bartókian abrasiveness to the world of minimalism.
The T'ang and the Callino both offered quartets by Haydn, the famous FifthsQuartet and the altogether less well-known B minor Quartet from the composer's Op 64. The contrast in playing style could hardly have been greater, the Callino Quartet approaching the Fifthswith an exaggerated, leader-dominated brightness influenced by the world of period-instruments performance, the T'ang Quartet following an understated path, almost too concerned to let the music speak for itself.
The young pianist Sophie Cashell, who shot to fame by winning BBC2's Classical Starcompetition last year, has no such compunctions.
Her musical approach is at the moment very much of the play-as-you-please variety. This led to some strange fluctuations of tempo in Beethoven's Sonata in D minor, Op 31 No 2, and an altogether too concerto-like delivery in Debussy's early Trio in G minor, and Brahms's Trio in B, for which she was joined by her sister Anna on violin, and brother Ben on cello.
Sibling ensembles are highly regarded in the musical world, but the Cashells playing style highlights diversity rather than shared values. Sophie is soloistically inclined, even to the point of emphasising oom-cha-cha accompaniments. Ben looks for the romantic route. And Anna plays with a sophisticated subtlety that's amazingly refined in the way she can suggest so much with the lightest of touches.
Finghin Collins teamed up with the two quartets for performances of Dohnányi's teenage Op 1 with the T'ang Quartet , and Schnittke's haunting quintet in memory of his mother with the Callinos. The Dohnányi quintet was admired by Brahms, who was flattered, no doubt, by the imitation involved, and right to have discerned the potential revealed in the work of a 17-year-old. But the piece is overheated, not so much grand as grandiose, and with little of the tightness of construction of the Brahms the work was modelled after.
There is an anguished bleakness in the Schnittke that Collins seemed to shy away from, and, contrariwise, a straightforward expressionism that the Callinos seemed to sidestep in favour of the avant-garde suggestions that they divined, for instance, in the work's use of quarter tones.
The obvious grand finale for a festival with two string quartets in residence would be Mendelssohn's Octet. Festival director Francis Humphrys opted instead for the little-known Octet of 1865 by Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen.
The performance lacked nothing in commitment or exuberance, and the players clearly enjoyed the elaborately woven textures of the slow movement, and made the most of the quirky fun that's in the Scherzo. But Svendsen's attitude was not to let go of a good idea when he found one, and, to modern ears, not all his ideas sound as good as he seems to have found them.
The festival provided another concentrated tryout of the Curtis Auditorium of the Cork School of Music. Unlike the rest of the building, the auditorium has a meanly utilitarian feel to it, from the entrances and the depressing colour scheme to the lighting.
The acoustic seems to need sorting, too. The sound quality varies hugely depending on where you sit, and it was only in the back row that I was able to find the intimacy of sound you would expect from such a compact space.
The time to resolve these issues is surely now. There's nothing radically unpleasant about the sound in the hall. But at the moment there's little sense of the sonic enhancement that a good hall can be expected to provide.
